This section of the novel begins in a very private way. Chapter Twenty-Six. Miles trades with Pansing, a Cambodian restaurant owner, refuses to be tricked out of money by B. J. a rather unscrupulous buyer of marine life and watches an entire baseball match with his father. He takes Angie to see the miracle of baby squid being born and, at the very end of the Chapter on September 1st, his father measures his height and Miles has grown – nine-sixteenth of an inch. (Miles confides in the final chapyer that he was destined to grow ten inches in the next twelve months.
Chapters Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Eight are concerned with the BioBlitz, the twenty-four census of marine life that is conducted by scientists and volunteers. There are many volunteers from Olympia who seem to have been galvanized by all the media publicity surrounding the bay. There are a host of truly amazing discoveries about the unexpected species that are fond in the day. However, during Professor Kramer’s concluding speech to all the assembled scientists and volunteers, the media’s attention is drawn to man who claims the mud in the bay has restored the hearing in his left ear. Miles attempts to phone his mother at the end of Chapter Twenty-Eight, keen to tell all the news of the BioBlitz. His father had been certain that Miles’s mother would come to the bay that day to witness the BIoBlitz, but his mother is in Chicago which seems to widen the gulf between them. The high tide that Florence predicted for September 8th duly arrives and draws crowd’s of people amazed at nature’s power. Miles finds Florence dead – she has taken an overdose of sleeping pills, but Mils hides the evidence of this. At the start of Chapter Thirty Miles meets up with Angie who gives him a passionate hug, which, because it overseen by a TV crew, leads Miles and Angie to take a trip in her father’s canoe. This is a momentous moment for Miles: Angie drifts off to sleep with her head in Miles’s lap. She is on a new prescribed medication which has made her calmer and she tells Miles (before she sleeps), “The ocean will wait for you, Miles,... and so will I.” (245)
Miles tells us in the months to come scientists came up with an explanation for the presence of all the unusual specimens found in the bay that summer, but there is no answer to the crucial question. How did Florence accurately predict the date of the highest tide for fifty years?
This novel is full of knowledge about the sea and serves as a warning that we should treat the world’s oceans better and never cease to be amazed at the secrets they hold, but it is also a novel about growing up and, in some ways, the most important thing in the novel is the relationship between Miles and Angie – which reaches a sort of peace i the final canoe trip together.
